An Artificial Intelligence Scripted This Short Film, but Humans Are Still the Real Stars

An Artificial Intelligence Scripted This Short Film, but Humans Are Still the Real Stars

We’re confused too, Thomas. Oscar Sharp Contemporary artificial intelligence algorithms are surprisingly good at wide range of tasks, from driving cars to playing Go. One thing they haven’t mastered yet? Creative writing. That’s the lesson of Sunspring, a new science-fiction short with a script composed by a recurrent neural network. (You can watch it here.) Far from suggesting that computers will be winning Academy Awards any time soon, it shows how much humans can still make meaning as we struggle with them. As Annalee Newitz explains in Ars Technica, Sunspring is the creation of director Oscar Sharp and A.I. researcher Ross Goodwin. Goodwin created the algorithm that spat out the script, training it on dozens of other film and television scripts that he found on the internet. They shot the…